Panda Initiative Update

More Panda’s and Penguins…

Panda has a new release dated November 20th 2012. This makes a total of 22 confirmed updates or “refreshes” as Google likes to call them. This refresh dates  back to the original launch of the Panda initiative in February 2011. Does Panda taste like chicken?

 

Panda’s Humble Beginning’s…

Thanks to Navneet Panda, the Google engineer that was the driving force behind Panda, thus the name, Google has been refining its algorithms ever since its first release.  The very first release affected about  11.8% of all English speaking web traffic, or searches. The most recent refresh effects about  1.1% of English inquiries or searches.  We never really know the exact nunber of queries affected, but if my math is even remotely accurate,  a normal new release impacts about 1.8-2.8% of all the English speaking traffic. Which, still makes it very much a force to be reckoned with.

 

The small animal’s Purpose …

Does it taste like Chicken, or Crow?  Many have complained , many have whined, many have grumbled, even a few have been angry, but Panda only tastes like chicken if you have cheated on SEO! I have said many times, that is “I must congratulate Google for their inventiveness and ingenuity,” they alone decided that the internet was becoming cluttered and needed to be cleaned up. The Panda initiative was designed to do just that. It works by lowering the value or ranks for sites that are too low in quality content, and too high in pure advertising.

 

Five Panda facts…

To help your site in the panda world, you should pay attention to the following items. First, focus on real, relevant, fresh and unique content. Second, trust, authority, ranking and relevance matter. Third, low quality content is unproductive for a search, block indexing of irrelevant or low quality content.  Fourth, keep advertising to content ratios low, think of load times and visual imagery on page. Fifth, Pay attention to Panda!

Finally, Google and small animal’s are our friends.


In Conclusion…

Google through the Panda initiate has helped make the web a better place. It is our job as SEO profecssionals to work to keep our sites, content rich, and relevant to the terms and phrases we want to be found for.

And above all things, expect more Panda’s in the future.